South Asian Keywords

Aanandi Murlidharan '23

This graph shows how frequently the terms “India”, “hindu”, “Pakistan” and “muslim” were mentioned in the College News Corpus along with context for each word. One can use this visualization by hovering their cursor over a specific term and bar year, where they can then see the exact name of the issue and a bit of context behind the passage where the keyword was mentioned. This is particularly helpful for those who would like to see specifically how certain South Asian communities were represented in Bryn Mawr College News in that particular time period. Countries such as Bangladesh and Nepal were excluded from this due to the fact that there was no data regarding either of them.

This project originally began with an intention to highlight the voices of South Asian Students in Bryn Mawr College. However, upon developing this project, I discovered that there were little to no mentions of the stories of South Asian Bryn Mawr students. Rather, it was focused around the current events and history behind South Asia. Therefore, I decided to present the data of two countries in South Asia (India and Pakistan) and the two largest religious groups in South Asia (Hindus and Muslims).

The data for the visualization was retrieved through a multiple keyword context search script. Using this script, I was able to pull every mention of the words “India, Pakistan, Muslim, and Hindu”, 200 character context every time the word was used and the specific issue date and year. I then used Altair to create my final data visualization. I used the strip plot graph within the Altair library and added tool tips to include the context behind the mention of the specific term in that issue. Finally, converted the chart to an HTML and uploaded it to the site.